Junior School is a busy place!

Lately we have been focusing on Science, our beautiful Monarch butterfly lifecycle, celebrating Sea Week and working together to get the best out of our learning!

Over the past few weeks we have been lucky enough to have Monarch caterpillars in the Junior School munching on swan plants. We have watched them turn into a chrysalis and then finally into beautiful Monarch butterflies. This has been amazing for the tamariki to observe and talk about together. Wonderful oral language opportunities! 

Last week was Science week at Macandrew Bay School and the juniors participated in lots of fun, engaging Science experiments through our Ka Hikitia time (Junior collaboration) with a focus on physical and chemical change. Some of these experiments included putting an egg in vinegar and watching how the vinegar changed the eggs state over time, making hokey pokey and creating a lava lamp using oil, water, food colouring and salt. It was awesome to hear the children talk about what they could notice with their scientist eyes and the wonderings they had. 

It was Sea week in Aotearoa in early March and the juniors had a focus on octopus. One of our fantastic junior teachers, Shelley Dixon, found some great videos about octopus that we watched. Kākano/Kōwhai class worked together to create an octopus and sea mural with some Year 5 children.  We created paper chains together to use as the tentacles and looked at a range of books about the sea to inspire the mural. We are yet to finish this off but watch this space!

Ka Hikitia is a special time for the junior school where we focus on a range of different learning areas including school wide inquiry focus, project learning, The Arts, Math and Science. The children work in whānau groups made up of children across the Junior School for this learning. Ka Hikitia means to step up, to lift up or to lengthen one's stride. It means stepping up how the education system performs to ensure māori students are enjoying and achieving education success as māori.

The role of education is to nurture every child's potential and to support their educational success. We have started to look at the whole school overarching concept for this year of Manaakitanga and looking at the different communities we are a part of in these sessions.

We also love our movement/fitness time together in the mornings and have started our Code groups across the three classes to learn more about how sounds, words, sentences and spelling of the complex English language works. Better together!